Education 2.0 & 3.0

Disinformation Toolkit 2.0 looks more broadly at the many ways disinformation impacts the work of CSOs and NGOs active in defense of human rights, humanitarian action, and across sectors of international development.

One student wanted to know why so many nurses were spreading vaccine misinformation.

Other participants drew parallels to popular crime-fighting myths found in shows like “Criminal Minds.”

But most of the college students who participated in a fact-checking workshop from MediaWise, the social-first digital media literacy initiative of the nonprofit Poynter Institute, were simply happy to report feeling more digitally savvy after the hour they spent learning to spot fact from fiction online.

MediaWise and its Campus Correspondents have been working since 2020 to slow the spread of online misinformation. In 2022, the goal is to train at 100 diverse colleges and universities, and availability is now opening up for another 25 workshops.

Students must understand how to recognize reputable information and how to identify credible, high-quality journalism. Bias is everywhere, and it’s necessary for young people today to identif…

Prepare your students for tomorrow's headlines with essential news and media literacy lessons, videos, printables, and more. From misinformation to the 24-hour news cycle (on TV and now on social media), students must learn to navigate a noisy, biased, and challenging world. But with the right support, they can learn to be critical and not cynical—to speak up, not sit back.

The issue of Fake News in general isn’t likely to go away. Kalev Leetaru in Forbes sends us A Reminder That ‘Fake News’ Is An Information Literacy Problem – Not A Technology Problem

Beneath the spread of all “fake news,” misinformation, disinformation, digital falsehoods and foreign influence lies society’s failure to teach its citizenry information literacy: how to think critically about the deluge of information that confronts them in our modern digital age. Instead, society has prioritized speed over accuracy, sharing over reading, commenting over understanding. Children are taught to regurgitate what others tell them and to rely on digital assistants to curate the world rather than learn to navigate the informational landscape on their own.

"School leaders often see a bright line between "educational technology" and "personal technology." To these educators, school-issued tablets or laptops are for learning and official curriculum while personal tech is for entertainment and communication.

From a student perspective, there is no such separation in day-to-day usage. They may take notes on their phones, email their parents from a school tablet, play educational or commercial games on a school laptop, or ask friends about homework in a group text from a personal device. I've worked with districts where parents are pushing back heavily against school tablets or laptops, but the same parents have provided their students with technology that offers many of the same capabilities for connectivity, communication, and browsing. It may be important to have distinctions between school and personal tech, but it is equally important to acknowledge that these distinctions are frequently irrelevant to our students."

When it comes to media literacy and our collective inability to tell fact from fiction online, there’s a lot of finger-pointing going on.

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A new law requires K-12 schools to add media literacy to curriculum for English language arts, science, math and history-social studies.

"Media literacy can help change that, advocates believe, by teaching students how to recognize reliable news sources and the crucial role that media plays in a democracy. "

“The increase in Holocaust denial, climate change denial, conspiracy theories getting a foothold, and now AI … all this shows how important media literacy is for our democracy right now,” said Jennifer Ormsby, library services manager for the Los Angeles County Office of Education. “The 2016 election was a real eye-opener for everyone on the potential harms and dangers of fake news.”

"The action of shifting college students from consumers to creators of Open Educational Resources can have positive impacts on student learning ..."

Perceptive adults and savvy students know that saying something doesn’t make it a fact, and neither does publishing information on the internet. But how to know which websites are sharing accurate information? As middle and high school students conduct research or access the internet on their own time, they need to be able to determine the accuracy of what they’re reading by reviewing websites with a critical eye.

A surge in awareness about disinformation among pupils and teachers has been accompanied by a rise in the number of teachers who bring up this thorny issue in the classroom. But the gap between demand and supply remains largely unchanged. The share of teachers saying digital literacy is important is still nearly 30 percentage points above those who say it is being taught.

As the world careens from one crisis to another—as COVID-19 brings us closed schools and massive unemployment, as horrific videos of police brutality spark more than a week of nationwide protests—one thing has been constant and concerning: We are devouring digital media, seeking out information and scrolling for solace.

And, let’s face it, we’re seeking and scrolling in the dark. We’re doing this literally, as we sit up at 2 a.m. in our bedrooms, scrolling and clicking and unable to sleep. And figuratively, clicking through mazes of media messages on social media, pushing through brush to find a trail. Most of us have had no guides to orient us in this streaming and screaming digital world.

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Jennifer LaGarde and Darren Hudgins write: "In November 2019, The Pew Research Center released its findings related to the devices Americans use to access news. As in previous years, Pew found that news consumers overwhelmingly turn to their mobile devices, rather than to a laptop or desktop, to catch up on the news of the day. And yet, when we visit schools around the country to help teachers and librarians develop media literacy lessons, we find the exact opposite to be true. In school, the vast majority of news literacy instruction still takes place with the devices that our kids are least likely to use when they leave our buildings." (Emphasis added.)

Our public square isn’t what it used to be. But, if schools lead the way, media literacy education can help us rebuild civic society. 

If the damage to public discourse wasn’t clear already, the recent controversy over political advertising on social media platforms surely drove the point home. While Twitter’s Jack Dorsey announced a ban on such advertising, Mark Zuckerberg defended Facebook’s decision to keep hosting political ads without subjecting it to rigorous fact-checking. 

Trust in media sources worldwide has dropped over the past decade. The task of rebuilding it will not succeed if we leave it to the media to be the gatekeepers - that task must fall instead to us, the consumers

Cultural assumptions about gender and race affect the construction of historical narratives and, as a consequence, the selection of instructional resources and the development of school curricula. Women, racial minorities, and LGBTQ individuals, for example, are generally either excluded from historical narratives or presented as marginalized and passive witnesses to history.